


etymology

by minuanos



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Beowulf - Freeform, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Linear Narrative, and this is just an overly complicated examination of how I think that relationship could have been, basically Alex meets and befriends Spencer when he's in college
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:19:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25811953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minuanos/pseuds/minuanos
Summary: “He reminds me of you,” James murmurs later that night, neither of them quite sleeping.“Spencer?” Alex twists round to face him, although she can’t tell if his eyes are open in the dim light. “What do you mean?”“Three PhDs before he can legally drink,” James says. “In and out of the FBI academy when most kids his age are barely graduating. It’s like he doesn’t know how to stop trying to prove something.”Alex frowns at him. “I wasn’t trying to prove anything.”“Yes, you were,” James says. “You still are.”
Relationships: Alex Blake & Spencer Reid, Alex Blake/James Blake
Comments: 24
Kudos: 87





	etymology

**Author's Note:**

> So. The really stressful early part of lockdown coincided spectacularly with my uni deadlines for an essay on traumatic grief + narrative form and another one on kingship in medieval literature. The outcome of that mess was some kind of mental fusion state wherein I'm just permanently sad about _Beowulf_ , I needed some way of processing that without actually trying to be academic about it, and here we are. I have absolutely no idea whether this makes sense or if my degree has just finally driven me insane, but I hope you enjoy it either way.

_Used up by the years, my memory  
loses its grip on words that I have vainly  
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way  
weaves and unweaves its weary history._

— Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Alastair Reid

—

Seamus Heaney once wrote, _þholian had opened my right of way._

He was talking about translation, and about the Old English verb meaning ‘to suffer,’ the way it drifted into the Irish vernacular of his childhood as ‘thole,’ made its way across the Atlantic on a wave of immigrants and stories. It’s a word that speaks of recognition, of shared history, shared loss and loneliness and survival to the present point. _Endure_ , it means, still grimly hanging on at the tipping point of a millenium. _Endure_.

A copy of Heaney’s _Beowulf_ translation arrives in Boston. It’s already well-read, over a decade’s worth of scribbles and sticky notes and several loose pieces of paper folded into it. There’s also a postcard tucked inside the flyleaf, _VIRGINIA LOVES YOU_ in bright letters on one side and _happy birthday, Alex_ in a near-illegible scrawl on the other.

Alex has devoted her life to reading between the lines and looking back as far as she needs to for things to make sense. This is what some might call a happy ending.

—

Old stories lean into the rule of three, and _Beowulf_ is no different. Monster, mother, dragon. There’s a fifty-year gap between the first two and that final, fatal fight, but it comes all the same.

Spencer nearly dies for her, and she knows without a doubt that she could not have lived with herself if that bullet had gone just a little deeper; Ethan is dead, but she is still his mother, and she sees him in the boy they rescue, in all the children; James has asked her to move to Boston with him, to end this strange liminal distance they’ve maintained for so long.

She feels like she’s holding every possible answer to an unreadable clue, balanced, prophet-like, on the edge of her own fate.

Alex means _warrior, defender_ , and once upon a time, that sort of title would have meant that you gave yourself up entirely to the things you loved, came back fighting again and again until there was nothing left. Once upon a time, a name like that foretold glory, and it came at a price, and once upon a time, Alex would have paid it unthinkingly.

But this isn’t an epic; there’s no grand honour to clutch at if she keeps fighting. Maybe she’d thought she had nothing to lose, but she was wrong. She doesn’t need to be able to see the future to know that she can’t keep going as it is.

 _I had a fixed purpose when I put to sea_.

Spencer isn’t her son, and she isn’t his mother, but there’s a relationship there that runs deeper than it should, and when she takes him home, they sit in silence because he already knows it all; knows what it looks like for a case to hit too close to her heart, to watch the past and present taking bites out of each other like a pair of vicious tides. So she tells him nothing and eventually he says, “Alex, it’s okay,” and they both know he’s not talking about the gunshot wound.

—

Spencer is older now than she was when they first met, and she’s seen him mourn several times before. Both of these are harsh realisations on their own, but something about this is harder to deal with. Maybe it’s because he can’t choose to come to her this time, can’t separate his grieving from his work; they’re coworkers now, and she has a front-row seat to the way Maeve’s death has set something adrift in him, a loose piece nothing will quite set back in place.

“I can’t stop thinking,” he admits to her, quiet words in an early morning. “I can’t stop thinking, it’s my _job_ to think, but I can’t stop thinking about her.”

Someone turns on the coffee maker in the background, a sudden rattling gurgle that makes them both jump.

Alex nods, because that drifting feeling is something she knows all too well; that sense of emptiness, of not having the words to grasp this unanswerable question. “ _Everything seems too large,_ ” she quotes at him after a moment, “ _the steadings and the fields._ ”

He gives her a long, searching look, because if anyone knows what it’s like to wear grief like a second skin, it’s Alex, and Spencer knows that she doesn’t use other people’s words lightly. “Yeah,” he says eventually, one long sigh.

The next day, she gives him her copy of _Beowulf_ , battered Faber & Faber logo stretching over years of rereadings. “Keep it for as long as it helps,” she tells him.

—

She’s not sure if returning feels more like a new page or turning back twenty years, or both at once. She can’t help but notice the differences: the paint jobs, the light fittings, the unfamiliar voice as she steps into the bullpen. “—clearly, she is smart, and capable, but is she _nice_?”

At first she thinks she’s got it wrong— she’s never been good with _newness_ , new people, new friends, and Penelope’s eyebrows are disappearing under her fringe with every word about the etymology of _nice_ — but then Spencer laughs.

“Yes, she’s nice, Garcia,” he says, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. “Alex, why didn’t you tell me? I’d have defended your honour earlier if I’d _known_.”

“You don’t get enough good surprises,” she tells him. She can feel every pair of eyes in the room on her— she’d almost forgotten what it was like to be in a room full of profilers, to have the room attempt to understand the backstory of a moment as it unfolds before them.

“Guest lecturing?” the woman who must be JJ asks, glancing at Spencer critically.

“We go back a long way,” Spencer admits. “I knew Alex before I knew Gideon.”

“Huh,” Derek Morgan says, holds out a hand to greet her. “Nice to meet you.”

“Really, actually nice,” Penelope says, still looking distinctly rattled. “In the nicest of ways nice.”

And it is nice, once it settles. Spencer starts showing up with crossword puzzles in the mornings, and at first she doesn’t have the heart to tell him to stop. It’s been a long time since she looked at a crossword, let alone with someone else, but the patterns and tricks come back to her soon enough, and it’s more comforting than she expects. Being back at the BAU feels the same way. The rest of the team are a little wary at first, surprised that Spencer has such a close bond with someone outside the team, but she doesn’t blame them for that. Soon enough, they find a rhythm, and the newness fades.

Working with Spencer is something else entirely. He’s brilliant, she’d known that already, but it’s different to see it firsthand, to fully map the scraps of him she’s gathered from over a decade of fleeting meetings and endless letters onto the solid physicality of his presence around her. Even so, she’s quick to notice he’s acting strangely, but she waits, lets him make the choice of reaching out. When it comes, there’s a familiarity to it, months of worry and hope twisted together. She tells him that when she first met James it took her a long time to understand her own feelings, and it was terrifying enough without the whole stalker situation; Spencer seems to be incapable of existing without also being mired in difficulty, and this is no exception. “Why wouldn’t she like you?” she asks him, because she doesn’t know this phone booth girl, but she does know Spencer, and she knows that the simple matter of whether she _likes_ him or not is probably going to be the easiest thing about this.

In the end she’s right, but in the worst possible way, and when Spencer’s scream rings out over a gunshot, the echoes fade together, going, going, gone.

—

James joins Doctors Without Borders, and though it looks a lot like a separation, she knows it isn’t, because they’re not like that. It’s an unspoken thing, this non-separation: he travels, and she teaches, and they email and call, and it’s not what a relationship should look like, but it’s theirs and it works. It’s a distancing, she decides, trying to come up with a word for this, their mutual need to process a shared experience alone, but not a separation.

She knows about distance; she rereads _Beowulf_ , thinks about what it means for a scholar to look backwards and find solace in this old story-pattern of battle and loss and mourning. 

_As the poet looks back into the past, surveying the history of kings and warriors in the old tradition, he sees that all glory (or as we might say, ‘culture’ or ‘civilisation’) ends in night. The solution of that tragedy is not treated— it does not arise out of the material. We get in fact a poem from a pregnant moment of poise, looking back into the pit, by a man learned in old tales who was struggling, as it were, to get a general view of them all, percieving their common tragedy of inevitable ruin._

It reminds her that Tolkien was a soldier before he was a scholar, and she wonders how much of her own work has been influenced by what she’s lost.

—

When Emily Prentiss dies, Spencer mourns with his team, but when she comes back from the dead, he comes to Alex. She knows grief, in all its forms, like an old friend— the grief of loss, the grief of betrayal, the grief of a resurging past— but watching Spencer learn them is a whole new kind of hurt. From a distance, she watches the job strip him down and build him up time and again, year after year, every physical and mental wound gradually thickening into scar tissue. He barely takes time off; on one of the rare times they see each other in person, she points out that he doesn’t know how to exist without the framework of the BAU around him, and he just shrugs it off with the frankness of someone who knows that their life has been built and baptised in difficulty. 

_I had a fixed purpose when I put to sea.  
As I sat in the boat with my band of men,  
I meant to perform to the uttermost  
what your people wanted or perish in the attempt,  
in the fiend’s clutches._

For all the times she’s wanted to march into the bullpen and shake some sense into Jason Gideon over the years, she doesn’t blame him when he leaves. Everyone had seen it coming, except perhaps Spencer, because Jason is brilliant, but he couldn’t let go of the job if he tried. They used to believe that lives were predetermined by fate, that you could read the future between lines that had already been written; Alex doesn’t need a fortune-teller to know that somewhere out there is a life where Spencer becomes another Jason, fated to throw himself into the jaws of their job over and over until it eventually spits out whatever’s left.

She invites him to guest-lecture with her at Georgetown in part because she needs him to know that he has another option.

—

The letters stop coming a few years into Spencer’s time with the BAU, replaced by sparse postcards and then solid weeks of silence. It’s foretelling something bad, but Alex doesn’t realise exactly how bad it is until he calls her up out of the blue, takes a week off work, and shows up at her home. It’s a mild evening, but he’s shaking like a leaf, clinging to the rail on her porch. It’s a strange time for her, because she’s not quite sure if she’s still a profiler or a mother at this point, but she doesn’t need to be either to know that something is terribly, terribly wrong. She invites him in, sits him down on the couch, reassures him that James is at work but he won’t mind having a visitor.

“What’s going on?” she asks eventually. In the light she can see the gauntness of his face, the shadows under his eyes, the lingering tremor in his hands as he clutches a mug of peppermint tea. “It’s okay, whatever it is. You just have to tell me.”

Spencer takes a deep breath. “I’m in trouble,” he says. “And I can’t tell the team, I’d— I’d lose my job, and the BAU’s all I have—”

“Okay,” Alex says. “Let’s start from the beginning.”

He gives her a long, tired look, but he tells her about Georgia in a flat monotone, reciting directly from the case report until his voice is hoarse, and she listens and puts the rest of the pieces together himself.

“This is why you haven’t been writing,” she says eventually, when he stops speaking altogether and just shoves the sleeve of his sweater up past his elbow. She’d expected the track marks, but seeing them is still like a punch to the gut. “Spencer, if I’d known—”

“Nobody knows,” he whispers. “I can’t— they’re suspicious, but nobody’s said anything—”

“Well, I’m saying something now,” she tells him. There’s a sudden flare of anger in her, because now she knows that Spencer stopped writing to her because she was the only person he thought would read between the lines enough to realise what was going on and act on it. “Drink your tea, and when James gets home, we’re going to talk about withdrawal, and we’re going to get you through this, okay?”

“Alex—”

“Spencer.”

He sets his mug down on the coffee table, picks at a loose thread on his sweater. “Can— can I hug you?” he asks, voice small and hesitant. It’s the first time she can remember him asking for touch in the ten years she’s known him; he’s twenty-five now, and so thin she can feel every bone in his back when he collapses into her. His hair is long and tangled; she smooths it back as best as she can, a familiar motion that makes her entire body ache with loss.

—

There’s an unanswered postcard on her bedside table; he does that sometimes, if they’re somewhere new for a case and he has time to find the brightest, silliest postcard he can get his hands on. James laughs and says it’s a bit morbid considering the reason he’s there in the first place, in that way which means _Spencer Reid is bizarre but quite charming really_ , and Alex says it’s quite hard to convey any sense of morbidity in scientifically improbably cartoon animals and _KISSES FROM OHIO_ spilling brightly out of a wobbly speech bubble, which means the same thing.

There’s an unanswered postcard on her bedside table, bright colours faded by a layer of dust, the room slightly musty from weeks of emptiness. She calls him intead, on the number he gave her when one of his new teammates finally forced him to get a mobile phone. He picks up immediately, says her name with a voice that cracks like he’s fifteen again, and she knows that he knows without either of them having to say it aloud. There’s a rustling in the background, and she realises he’s at work, in the bullpen by the sounds of it. _“No, Morgan, I’m— look, this is a personal thing, can you give me a minute—”_ A door slams in the background, and Spencer inhales. _“Sorry,_ ” he says. “ _God, Alex. I’m so sorry.”_

She can’t bring herself to speak at first, not sure how her words work in this strange new reality. Once upon a time, there was a world where a mother would rise from whatever dark place she was in and turn on the world that put her there, _grief-racked and ravenous, desperate for revenge_. Alex can’t do that. She’s angry, and grieving, but she knows she won’t turn her fury outwards against a nameless force. This is something too big for her to grasp at alone.

James comes into the room after her, raises an eyebrow when he sees she’s on the phone.

“Spencer,” she explains, watches his face relax into understanding.

“ _I’m here_ ,” Spencer says.

—

_The wisdom of age is worthless to him.  
Morning after morning, he wakes to remember  
that his child is gone._

_Ethan_ comes from Hebrew, means _endure_ , and of course she’d known that when she named him, had looked back into the word-history like it could tell her his future. She hadn’t realised that it would be hers to endure, to thole.

_He gazes sorrowfully at his son’s dwelling,  
the banquet hall bereft of all delight,  
the windswept hearthstone; the horsemen are sleeping,  
the warriors underground; what was is no more._

She stops doing crossword puzzles. It’s not a conscious decision, but it’s something about answers, something about empty spaces, something about the fact that they never do find out exactly what undefinable thing took their son away. The lack of a word for it bothers them both, the fact that this, of all things, is unsayable.

_Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed  
and sings a lament; everything seems too large,  
the steadings and the fields._

They’re halfway through _The Hobbit_. She reads aloud while James talks to the doctors in their own language, a blue of fluorescent lights and buzzing machines and statistics, future-tellings she wishes she didn’t have to know. They’re halfway through, there and back again, except Alex doesn’t know if there’s any way back from this. Ethan is nine and sleeping, going, going, gone.

—

Spencer makes it into the BAU and she isn’t there. He writes her a letter after his first day, and she can read the anxiety and excitement warring between the lines. The tone changes quickly, brightening week by week as he finds his feet and a place in the team— he doesn’t give a lot of details, a mixture of government security and simple tact underlying every phrase, but she can tell that he’s happy, he’s busy, he’s building himself a home. There’s still a part of her that hates it, because home shouldn’t be a bullpen and a job dragging him through the worst of humanity, but he signs his letters _love, Spencer_ and his handwriting is worse than ever, and yes, the BAU is a difficult place to call home, but by now she’s pretty sure that Spencer Reid doesn’t know how to thrive in anything other than difficulty.

—

The Amerithrax incident happens, the mistake, the betrayal, the fall, and she’d be lying if it didn’t hurt like hell, packing up her desk in a hurried early morning so she can avoid her suddenly-ex-coworkers’ eyes. Everyone knows that something’s not right— you can’t hide things in a bullpen full of profilers, but either there’s nothing they can do or nobody’s willing to put their necks out for her. It hurts, but she’d also be lying if she wasn’t a little relieved to go, to spend what time she could with a son she already knows is slipping away from her.

She writes to Spencer, gives him the truth that nobody around her except James will believe. _Be careful_ , she doesn’t say, but tries her best to slip it between the lines, because she doesn’t want to kill off that desperate ambition of his, but she can’t let him fulfil it without knowing what to expect. _Here there be dragons_.

—

Spencer and Ethan meet, just once, when she and James both happen to have time off over Thanksgiving and decide to invite him to dinner. It goes well, all things considered: Spencer, who warned her multiple times that he’s awful with children but has also apparently memorised every scrap of information she ever gave him about her son, just sits down beside Ethan’s chair and starts talking about birds. He knows a little ASL too, and by the time Alex has finished in the kitchen, they’re having a conversation with a little help from James, who sends her a look of _where the hell did you find this kid_ when she comes back into the room.

“He’s just as smart as you or James,” Spencer says later, over cups of tea while James puts Ethan to bed. “It must be so frustrating to not be able to—” He cuts himself off, looking at her with guilty eyes. “I mean, I’m sure he can— I didn’t mean—”

“He can do some things,” Alex says. “But you’re right, it’s frustrating for him. We’re pretty good at understanding each other, but most other people just don’t know how to communicate with him, and there’s other stuff he knows he can’t do.” She shakes her head, tries to dislodge the emotion pressing at the back of her throat. “I think he understands that it’s only going to get worse, too. We don’t have a timeframe— we don’t even have a _name_ for it— but we know it’s coming.”

“That’s a hard thing to know,” Spencer says. “To watch, as well.”

She raises an eyebrow at him for that, because that sounded a little too familiar, and she knows that Spencer doesn’t really do casual conversational platitudes. He colours a little, takes a deep breath.

“My mother's a paranoid schizophrenic,” he says quietly, and an awful lot of pieces click into place at once. “I had to move her into a care home last summer because I couldn’t— I knew I wouldn’t be able to balance taking care of her and working on my thesis and starting at the academy at the same time, and she deserves better than that.” He pauses, takes a long sip of his tea, and Alex watches the steam rise over the dark circles under his eyes.

“He reminds me of you,” James murmurs later that night. Ethan is quiet and Spencer’s curled up on a couch that’s about a foot shorter than him, and she and James are in bed, neither of them quite sleeping.

“Spencer?” Alex twists round to face him, although she can’t tell if his eyes are open in the dim light. “What do you mean?”

“Three PhDs before he can legally drink,” James says. “In and out of the FBI academy when most kids his age are barely graduating. It’s like he doesn’t know how to stop trying to prove something.”

Alex frowns at him. “I wasn’t trying to prove anything.”

“Yes, you were,” James says, and yawns when she pokes at his face. “You still are.”

—

When Spencer turns eighteen, she introduces him to Jason Gideon, and she will wonder whether to regret that decision or not for the rest of her life. Watching that first conversation is like putting a match to touchpaper, and she has to resist the urge to step back from the sparks. Jason sees the same potential as she did, but he pulls at strings that nobody else would even think of, and the end result is that Spencer is set to be fast-tracked through the academy as soon as he’s finished his third PhD. Jason says he’s ready, focuses on his ambition, his stubbornness, the way he burns bright and hungry as a wildfire, and Spencer, starry-eyed and starving for purpose, insists that he isn’t wrong.

 _Spencer_ means _dispenser, provider_ , and she knows he has so much to give, but she also knows how much the job, and the world it exists in, can take and take and take. They ask her to sign on as a character reference and she agrees, the taste of ash in her mouth.

—

Eventually they figure out that Ethan’s condition, whatever else it may be, is degenerative; at his age, this basically amounts to his body breaking down faster than it can learn. He never quite manages to speak, but that doesn’t mean they don’t communicate. It’s a strange language, and all their own: a range of sounds and gestures, eye movements, a variation on ASL that adapts and changes with his motor skills. He’s fascinated by birds; his room is filled with posters and charts, and the small tree in their front garden is weighed down by an assortment of feeders. He’ll sit for a long time just watching, and when Alex finishes her work and joins him he’ll point out the family of sparrows that lives in the roof of their house. He learns about them, and from them, too, mimicking their chirps and trills and long whistled notes. Their house is full of birdsong.

She and James keep working, but it’s a fine balance: he’s part-time at the hospital, and she consults from home when she can, and between them they can just about work it out. There are years of seizures that squeeze at her throat until they find a medication that works; there are endless tests and interviews and new pieces of equipment. When Ethan is about four, one of James’s coworkers puts them in touch with a respite facility in the countryside, and after that there are occasional weekends where the three of them can stay there, meet other families, rest in the shared knowledge that they’re not the only ones having to bear it all. Even so, Alex constantly feels like she’s on the precipice of something unfathomable.

Her work is brutal and frantic, scrabbling and clawing at ideas until something clicks into place, the answer coming to her like a lifeline. She dreams in translation, surfaces breathless and shaking, choking on questions unasked and unanswered. Sometimes James is beside her, and he wakes up enough to stretch an arm out and pull her close; sometimes she’s alone, and on those nights she gets up and makes herself tea, sits in the kitchen with one ear turned to Ethan’s bedroom door and spreads a crossword in front of her, works through the incoherence until the flood in her mind dies down.

—

She has to explain it to James when they stop emailing and switch to old-fashioned letters. He isn’t judgemental, just curious, and she ends up saying that she’s mentoring him, because there really isn’t a word for what she and Spencer have. Sometimes they call, and there are extremely rare face-to-face meetings, but mostly she gets to know him through his writing, which she thinks is probably the best way anyone could get to know Spencer Reid. In person he rambles and stammers and digresses, avoids eye contact and flinches away from handshakes; his letters are long but coherent, a mixture of sparse personal details and enthusiastic, well thought-out theories.

She sends him proof copies of her articles, and he responds with screeds of handwritten commentary; he sends her a copy of his PhD thesis, which is incomprehensibly mathematical, but she’s proud of it all the same. When she asks, he also sends a photo from his commencement ceremony, gangly and long-haired in a hooded robe. When James sees that there’s a random kid who’s barely pass for a graduating highschooler amongst the diplomas and family pictures on their sentimental shelf, he doesn’t question it, just shrugs and says it’s nice to have a face to put to the name.

—

Ethan has the first seizure when he’s less than two years old, and soon after that he’s formally diagnosed with an unspecified neurological condition. ‘Diagnosed’ feels like the wrong word— it’s taken them this long to get a medical professional who isn’t James to acknowledge that there’s something going on, and all anyone can say is that they’ve never seen this particular range of symptoms before. It makes Alex want to scream, because her entire profession is based around working unprecedented combinations of evidence into a solvable profile, but James just takes it in his stride. He starts pulling strings, gets them appointments with what feels like every neurologist in the country; around the same time, Caltech invites her to guest lecture. In a turn of events that some would call lucky and others, once upon a time, would call fated, things line up.

The lecture has a decent turnout: mostly faculty and postgrads from various departments, a scattering of curious undergraduates, and one scruffy-looking highschooler in the front row. They have questions at the end, and she’s a little pressed for time when the last of them finally file out of the room. Richard Matthews, the professor who invited her in the first place, hangs back as she’s gathering her notes together. He’s friendly but pompous, with an unfortunate tendency for chatter.

“I can’t stay, I’m afraid,” she says before he can greet her. “My husband and my son are at an appointment, I was hoping to catch the end of it— either way, I have the car, I need to pick them up.”

“Not a problem, Doctor Blake,” he says. “But I would like to introduce you to someone, if that’s alright?”

The highschooler from the third row is standing beside him. He’s skinny and pale, with a look that reminds Alex of a startled cat. “Hi,” she says. “Did you enjoy the lecture?”

“Very much so,” the kid says. “I’ve been thinking about how traditional linguistic analysis might have been affected by the increasingly rapid development of electronic communication for a while now, and it was fascinating to hear how that applies in forensic work and behavioural analysis.”

The sentence is rattled off as quickly as if it had been rehearsed, but there’s a strange inflection to it, like there’s some disconnect between his thoughts and his voice. Alex blinks in surprise, and beside her, Matthews chortles and claps a hand on the kid’s shoulder, eliciting a barely perceptible flinch.

“Spencer Reid,” he says. “One of our current PhD candidates.”

“I see,” Alex says. “What’s your thesis on?”

“Oh,” Spencer says, cheeks flushing a little. “I’m not actually—”

“Spencer is currently part of our mathematics programme,” Matthews interrupts. “But as you can see, his interests extend rather beyond that.”

Alex nods. “Math, huh,” she says. “That’s a whole other language, and not one I’m particularly familiar with.”

“I did a joint BA in psychology and sociology,” Spencer says quickly. “And I sit in on a lot of courses in other departments, and if I finish my doctorate on schedule I’m hoping to go for a second one, probably in chemistry—”

“That’s a lot of options,” Alex says. “Got a particular career in mind?”

“I’m interested in the FBI,” Spencer says, glancing at Matthews as if he’s going to object. “The BAU, specifically. I’m, uh— I’m not just saying that because you’re here. I like problem solving, and challenges, and I want to— to _understand_ , but I can’t do anything about that until I’m at least twenty-three, so for now I’m just…” He shrugs, a jerky little movement of his bony shoulders.

“You’re learning,” Alex says. “There’s nothing wrong with that.” She hesitates, then asks, “if you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?”

“Fifteen,” Spencer says.

“That’s a bit of a wait,” she agrees. “Sounds like you’re well on track, though.”

She catches a glimpse of the clock on the opposite wall, and sighs. “I’m so sorry, I really have to go,” she says. “Thanks again for having me, Richard— and it’s good to meet you, Spencer. Really.”

She’s profiling him in the back of her mind, of course, and the way it adds up sits uncomfortably in the pit of her stomach. Halfway to the door, something jolts in her brain, and she turns back. “Actually,” she says, “I’m not entirely sure of the way back to the parking lot from here. Would one of you be able to walk me there?”

She’s doing her best to make eye contact with Spencer, but he doesn’t look up; luckily, Matthews pushes him forwards, saying something about office hours. She asks him a couple of questions, and soon he’s talking a mile a minute, hands flying in front of him. It’s clear that he’s read every paper she and her teammates have ever published, and by the time they reach her car she’s pretty sure he could recite Jason Gideon’s entire bibliography from memory if she asked him to.

She’s never met anyone like him before, and yet there’s a strange familiarity there. She can almost see the stubborn hunger for knowledge flickering and sparking with every word he says, but there’s a weariness there too, a impression of a difficult world that shouldn’t be looking out of a fifteen-year-old’s eyes.

She pulls a business card out of her purse, scribbles her personal email address down on the back. “Get in touch with me,” she says, pressing it into Spencer’s hand. “I'd like to talk to you again when I’m in less of a hurry.”

Spencer stares at her, wide eyes not quite meeting hers. “Yeah,” he says, a second too late. “Yeah, that would be— thank you, Doctor Blake.”

—

What it comes down to, now and always, is connections.

—

Pregnancy terrifies her, the newness of it, the way the weeks keep ticking past one by one. James is endlessly patient and reassuring, telling her _it’s okay, Alex, it’s okay to worry but I promise you don’t have to_ , but she hasn’t spoken to her family in years, doesn’t have a mother or an aunt who can tell her what to expect. She’s been with the BAU for a few years at this point, and what she does have is Erin Strauss, who stops by her desk one day and sets a little jar of old-fashioned ginger sweets down on top of the files. “Morning sickness is a bitch,” she says without preamble, and Alex just nods, a little dazed, reminding herself for the umpteenth time that there’s no point trying to keep secrets in a bullpen full of profilers.

The ginger sweets help.

A little while later, she and Erin are in the same car on the way back from a case, and in a sudden rush of _something_ , either bravery or panic, Alex says, “Do you ever get used to it?”

“It?” Erin asks without looking away from the road. It’s not an outright dismissal, so Alex takes a moment to reorganise her thoughts and keeps going.

“I’m scared,” she admits. “I’m so scared that I— that I won’t understand.” Her whole world is based around reading between lines that have already been written; she doesn’t know what she to do when she’s the one holding the page steady.

“For god’s sake, Blake,” Erin says, her name a sharp sigh, and Alex waits. “You got into the FBI at twenty-four,” she continues. “Yesterday you cracked a written code with nothing but the victims’ names to work with. I think you’ll be able to handle a tiny human whose main concerns are food, sleep, and physical affection.”

There’s a _but, but_ in Alex’s mind, but she doesn’t say it aloud. “I can drive for a while,” she says instead. “Pull over when you get a chance.”

Erin just shakes her head. “Nobody knows what to do,” she says, more gently. “But we all figure it out. You’ll see.”

(The day that Ethan is born, a physical connection is exchanged for something intangible and stronger than she could have ever imagined. He is the only thing in her life she would ever give herself up entirely for).

—

James suggests hyphenating their names when he proposes: _Miller-Blake has a ring to it_ , down on one knee with the tiny box in one hand. She says yes to the ring, but no to the name, because a hyphen is a connection that can’t help implying separation, and a part of her knows, even then, that she and James aren’t going to be like that.

Her brother dies, and that’s a connection well and truly broken, because it’s a short funeral and a long time before she deals with her family again.

Her supervisor has connections, and uses them; Alex has an interview with the FBI academy before she’s even finished her doctorate.

—

She goes to college as early as they’ll take her, and nearly drowns herself in knowledge. She dreams in half-learnt languages, memorises entire hip-hop albums because they’re the only words she can find that move fast enough to still the constant motion in her mind. There’s a pyre of loneliness in the pit of her stomach, but she swallows the ashes back down and tears into words, all the words, until she can clamber deep inside some Indo-European root and wrap herself in every layer of connected meaning she can find.

In her first year of postgrad, there’s a boy in the library, a medical student. They keep running into each other, between shelves and flights of stairs, and after a while she finds that she can’t ignore him when they’re in the same room. She invites him to get coffee with her first, and soon it’s a regular thing, coffees, lunches, occasional events. He’s as sharp and ambitious as she is, but he wears it calmly, smooth and unshakeable as a cliff-face against her wild sea of _more, more, more_.

 _(Blake_ is Old English, but beyond that she can trace it back to words mean both _pale_ and _black_ , and the fact that at some point two opposites coalesced into a single indeterminable thing fascinates and frustrates her in equal measure for a long time.)

“The beginning of _Beowulf_ is untranslatable,” she’s saying absently as he walks her home one evening. “I mean, there’s no modern equivalent to _hwæt,_ so the closest we get is something like _hark_ , or _listen_ , or, I don’t know—”

“Hey,” James says, and kisses her.

It’s starlings at dawn, snowflakes at night, a murmuration of light and dark flying and falling together, and Alex decides then and there that she can cope with the undefinable if it feels like this.

—

_CATHERINE JANE MILLER: A CELEBRATION OF HER LIFE._

Crossword puzzles instead of a bedtime story, her mom reading the clues aloud and helping her think through them until she falls asleep with words drifting through her dreams. Quiet Saturday mornings passing the paper back and forth until the rest of the house is awake and the puzzle’s done. Sitting by a hospital bed, reading the clues aloud and filling in the answers when she’s too weak to hold the pen herself. Front row of the funeral, staring down at the order of service because she can’t bring herself to look at the coffin, reordering and anagramming and rearranging the words as if they could ever mean anything else.  
**_  
_ M   
I J   
C E L E B R A T I O N   
A L N F _  
_ T E E   
H E R  
L I F E  
R  
I  
N  
E**

You’re not supposed to start with all the answers laid out in front you, and there’s so much she can’t fit into it, so many things that go beyond words: the colon, the full stop, the _1941_ and _1982_ and the forty-year hyphen between them, the photo of her mother in the centre of the page. It was taken a few years before Alex was born, and they almost look alike, the same hair, eyes, bone structure repeating years apart— they used to call it their own kind of fortune-telling, saying that Alex would know how she aged long before she got there.

Alex doesn’t know how she’ll look at fifty.

 _A_ , a whole word and a single letter, can’t be worked into the non-crossword either.

—

Once upon a time, Alex is waiting for the school bus with a battered prose translation of _Beowulf_ open in her hands. She picked it up for the bronze helmet on the front, the promise of dragons and warriors, kings and treasure, on the back; she doesn’t know about the sorrow of it all yet, the sort of desperate loneliness that will drive someone into so far the past in search of a story. When she asks the librarian about it, she’s handed a textbook with an extract of the original Old English. It’s too thick and heavy to carry home, so she carefully copies out that one page and tucks it inside the book. Later that night she sets them side by side under the covers and traces the words back and forth, chasing a thousand years with a flashlight.

Slowly, she will recognise that _Beowulf_ is a poem worn through by the gaps of time and place, of language and loss. She will reread that unknowable opening line and wonder how she can feel that she understands something so distant, plunging her hands into the guts of the words, picking them apart time and again in search of an answer.

So. Here is a fortune-telling for free: in every bewildered attempt to prove that she cannot understand, she will understand a little more.

—

_Joy and sorrow are the common lot, and, under heaven, men must mark of their lives what they can. For they enjoy the light and warmth and company in hall but for a while, and outside is the encompassing dark._

— Gwyn Jones

**Author's Note:**

> I am so sorry if the formatting for that crossword thing is messed up on whatever device you're reading this on. I swear it made sense in my head (actually, you know what, that's my disclaimer for this whole fic).
> 
> The quote at the start is from 'Poem Written In A Copy Of Beowulf' by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Alastair Reid.  
> The paragraph of scholarship about a poet looking into the past is from J.R.R. Tolkien's essay, 'The Monsters and the Critics.'  
> The quote at the end is from Gwyn Jones' _Kings Beasts & Heroes_.  
> All other quotes are from various sections of _Beowulf_ itself, trans. Seamus Heaney.
> 
> Cheers for reading!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [untitled](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26414431) by [hfszn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hfszn/pseuds/hfszn)




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